Drift Deeper Into the Sound
by starinhercorner
Summary: Experts say only 7% of communication is verbal. Thank goodness, because otherwise these two would never get anywhere. Post-series Circex fluff.


**(Author's Note: ...Be warned, this was written mostly because I want there to be more Circex _out there_. The ratio of canon material to fan material for this pairing is just plain out of whack in this shipper's opinion. Also, I tried to keep the perspective balanced between the two of them to an extent, but there's probably more Circe.)**

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"Should we really be doing this _here_?" Rex questions in a subdued voice, his lips moving in useless ways. Circe presses down on them hard with her own, and hers slip over his like an eraser to any more words that would have otherwise drawn out the wait.

"Maybe if you feel like defining 'this,' I can wait till we find someplace better," she dares, her voice resonating with the faraway thunder.

Rex's jaw drops, and a bead of water falls with it. "Uhhhh..." Circe traces the left side of his open mouth with her fingertip and pushes the smile on her lips up to her eyes. Rex ducks his head down and touches his forehead to hers. "Well at least we got out of the rain."

"Exactly. Because we're just that responsible." They both close their eyes as they laugh but they can still see lightning flash. Rex quiets down first to take in her smile with his eyes before taking it in with his lips—and teeth, still grinning, and Circe almost pulls away for a moment to let him know that his technique could use some improvement. But before that moment can come, Rex pushes his lips out against hers and nips at her, and her heart feels like it wants to spring up through her chest just to get closer to his breath. They release, then catch, then release again, both of them enjoying the quick bursts too much to hold on for long; until Circe curls her fingers around Rex's soaked shoulders and leads him back a few steps, finding the brick wall with her spine while he finds it with his hand. She lays her right hand on the side of Rex's face to express that she wants to sustain this kiss, but Rex breaks out of the magnetic pull between their mouths and kisses her thumb instead. "_Rex,_" she huffs mutedly, pretending to protest despite how her cheeks are aching from smiling so much. Her voice is laced into the whisper just enough to carry it over the rush of the rainfall.

Both pairs of eyes are open now, colors of earth and fire mixing between them. "_Couldn't resist. Also, why are we whispering?_"

"_I don't know, why are you?_"

"_Because you did!_"

Circe rolls her eyes. "_If I jumped off a bridge, would you—never mind."_

"_Yes,_" Rex replies, as if it's nothing. Circe realizes that the archaic comeback would be a stupid way to make her point to any boy who can grow his own turbine-propelled wings, but especially to Rex.

"_I said, never mind._"

"_We're still whisper-iiiiing..._" Rex raises his eyebrows and gives his head a light shake, like the ringing of a bell.

"_Yes, Rex. Yes, we are. How astute of you._"

"_Do I get a award for being 'astute'?_"

Circe rolls her eyes at the emphasis on her word choice, remembering how he teased her for using the word "nitwit" when they'd first met. She considers pointing out in her defense that at least she's speaking in a language they both understand, something Rex is notorious for dropping the ball on. But instead, she smirks then cups Rex's face in her hands, guiding it down to meet his lips to hers and holding him there for the longest kiss they've shared since landing in the alleyway. Circe's satisfied sigh flares into Rex's skin from her nose, and he can feel warmth swell in his cheeks. The pounding of the rain eases off for the time being.

"_Congrats. You've just won the 'Most Likely to Make Someone Kiss You to Make You Stop Talking' Award."_

"Suh-weet," Rex blurts out, too unravelled now to whisper. The muscles of his face rise and fall against her still-present hands as he forms the word.

"Hold on a minute." Circe makes a move to thumb away the traces of dark red that have rubbed off from her mouth onto his.

"Nope." Rex interrupts this action by divebombing straight into another kiss, one that would push the back of Circe's head into the wall if not for the hand that weaves its way behind her head and knits her wet hair around its gloved fingers. Circe's immediate response to the impact (however cushioned it may be) is to bear her teeth and bite down, taking Rex's upper lip in past the outer surface of hers and letting it go as his lower lip sweeps up to her mouth from the base of her chin. After that slippery fumble, their lips align and the kiss becomes softer, tamer, a step back before a leap.

Rex pulls away for what Circe can only assume is air, based on how her own system is spiralling into overdrive, and the teens detach once again from the wall. Circe quickly becomes aware of the lipstick smears now painted all along both Rex's mouth and her own, and frowns. Rex clears his face of the red mess with the back of his hand and she follows suit, eyes darting off to one side and then the next; a little too excited, a little too nervous.

"Got you," Rex declares, a smirk tugging his mouth to the left at one end; and the rain picks up its slack again, coming down in a fresh sheet.

"What?" Circe asks, oscillating slightly at the shoulders as her voice reflects the teasing tone in his. The mischief in his smile, just as contagious, infects hers, too.

"To take that stuff off your face."

Circe blinks twice before responding, but doesn't think twice. "To _what?_"

Rex lightly taps a corner of Circe's mouth, where her bare lips have been kissed and wiped a warm, buzzing pink. The color stands out vividly in the blue-grey shadows cast on her face by Rex, the walls, and the storm. Rex looks away for a moment, his eyes narrowing with thought, then looks back at her and pronounces confidently, "_Tu sonrisa es bella.__"_

Circe sighs in resignation as Spanish continues to be a foreign language to her, although "_bella_" strikes her as vaguely familiar. Meanwhile, Rex's finger lingers on her face. "You're terrible. But in that case..." Without warning, she latches onto the fabric of Rex's glove with her teeth—collected rainwater seeping onto her tongue, cold and salty with hints of his skin washed in—and starts pulling.

"Whoa," Rex utters as she manages to wring one finger loose and reaches over for the next with an open mouth and hooded eyes. "Alright, alright!" He takes the hint and removes his gloves, clumping them up in his hand and shoving them into an inner pocket of his jacket.

Circe crosses her arms and nods, a triumphant "hmph" barely making to Rex's ears as it vies for audibility against splashing of rain onto the sidewalk, but making it all the same. Rex crosses his arms as well, but to pretend to brood.

The playful exchange of looks only lasts so long between them before they are hooked into each other again, their hands and lips aflame despite the chill clinging to their wet clothes and to any hair a helmet hadn't been covering before. Rex off-handedly recalls something Holiday once told him about the neck being one of the warmest parts of the body in any given weather, so he decides to test it—his family's penchant for science manifesting itself at a very peculiar time.

His fingers untuck from the locks of Circe's hair that frame her face, then he follows the line of her jaw to the high neckline of her undershirt and tugs the fabric down an inch or so. His knuckle rests on her quickening pulse as his lips find room to explore.

Her breath escapes between her teeth in a shudder, and as she draws it back in it inflates her chest to the point where she doesn't know how her ribs are not splitting apart. She's had the wind knocked out of her before, but she never knew the wind could be knocked _into_ her. Her shoulder soon crowds him out as the sudden constriction in her body shoves it upward, so he makes his way back to the side of her upturned face, his kisses like footsteps lifting off and touching down upon her skin. Her airways don't unlock until he trails off for good.

"Huh, what do you know..." Rex muses, a little dazed, as Circe stares at him intensely, completely lost as to what else to do with herself. Her cheeks flare up as pink as her lips, as pink as her nose and fingertips in the cold. Her fingers feel as tight as fists despite being fanned out disorderly at her hips, and her arms go stiff like planks nailed to her sides.

"_Rex_," she stresses, breathlessly, and Rex could honestly peg the feeling behind it as any emotion in the world that's strong. The soles of his shoes grate into the concrete they cover as he gives her a few more inches of space. He doesn't know how else to respond, with the exception of the joke brewing in the back of his head about vampires and "_vanting_ to suck your _blahhhd_" that he's tempted to resort to.

She smiles before he gets the chance. Through pursed lips, Rex lets out a subtle sigh of relief that gets sealed away by Circe's lips as she steps forward and pulls him in by the open folds of his jacket. Her hands find their way inside while his slip down to her elbows from her shoulders, his fingers stretching out to brace her bones as well as he can.

The warmth that has trickled its way to the surface of her skin and tinged it with blush is so strong that Rex can feel it on his own face. He knows he's supposed to close his eyes, but he doesn't want to, and since hers are closed he can get away with it. The expression on her face as she's kissing him is still too new and rare to miss. In this moment, she isn't fighting anything. He knows how much she's struggled to find a place of her own, and in this moment, she's absolutely settled.

That's what he _thinks_ he's seeing, at least, until her arms break out of his hold and her nails start skimming along the skin of his neck, giving rise to tiny bumps in their tracks before her fingers take root in his hair. He shuts his eyes and shudders audibly—exaggeratedly, more like he's seen a ghost than anything—and she hums a laugh into their kiss that leaves both pairs of lips involved feeling electric. A wet, warm breath fogs the lining of his t-shirt, hitting the skin of his collarbone like a shock. The thunder that roars beyond them seems only natural even though Rex is barely still aware of the rain.

"My turn..." Circe murmurs as she adminsters a round of kisses up his neck. She balances on her toes and nudges Rex's head down closer in order to improve her access to his ear and finish the job. "...It's only fair," she adds as she sets herself back down on her heels. Her hands station themselves back at his chest. Her focus drifts a bit off to the side afterward, her mind strung out and swimming in reflections.

Rex's forehead chases after hers like a balloon tied to an anchor, even bobbing against it clumsily for a moment before hovering above. "So... is this a game now? 'Cause I'm... pretty good at games."

Circe's eyes roll into contact with his, and for some reason his tone of voice makes her picture him flexing his muscles like the goof he is. "Oh. You mean, like volleyball?" she teases with a slanted smile.

Rex's face maneuvers through an oddly charming range of emotions, from stunned to defensive to pleased, in no time flat. "You tell me, you've seen my technique." His eyebrows send a little wiggle her way. Circe nearly spits with laughter as she's pretty sure he's just suggested more than he meant to, although it's safe to say neither of them are legitimately concerned with sports right now. Rex, meanwhile, tries to recall an occasion where it has been so easy to make Circe laugh, but fails to, and is absolutely delighted. Every new side of her that comes to light excites him, just like every new color in her hair—which seems to have become a thing with her, based on the white, green, and magenta streaks that taper down the right side of her head, and the light blue that sticks out on the left.

Circe's arms loop around Rex's neck, interlocking at the wrists. The position has become a familiar one over the past few months, starting from when they first saw each other again, when Circe was just glad to be holding tightly to something immovable that wasn't a row of steel bars. The fizz of rain bearing down on the asphalt reminds her of ocean spray, and she tries to not let herself stumble any further down memory lane while looking into Rex's eyes. However, she has to admit that Rex was the best thing she's ever had knock her down—a statement that sounds all kinds of embarrassing and awful in her head, so she opts for a better response to his... "question." "I'd say it's crude, but effective."

Completing the embrace, Rex's arms wind around the small of her back like a band. It's a framework that always seems to work perfectly for them; at any moment she could pull him down or he could lift her up, but they stay comfortably balanced instead. "I'll take it!" Rex chirps. Circe shrugs a bit at his enthusiasm, how he always manages to fit it into the strangest situations, but she knows she's one to talk about strangeness.

"Weren't, uh... weren't we in the middle of something?" she points out after their eyes idle around for a time and their limbs go static.

"_Ohhhh, si_,_ si_. _I_ see where you're going with this." Rex replies, and his tongue darts out to prep his lips. Circe winces at his... finesse, and her mouth clamps shut as a reflex, but her lips relax into a smile by the time his make contact.

The kiss builds steam as quickly as their hearts start racing, the momentum from before proving to have not been spent. Circe shifts weight to her toes again and rocks forward, and Rex pulls her waist in so tight that he can feel her breathe against him, and vice versa. They sway side-to-side, and the storm a few feet away seems to lose power as the force of nature in their grip grows. They almost hit a rhythm of one chest rising as the other falls, but the energy between them is too wild to allow such a structure to their movement. Her elbows line up to his shoulders as her arms reach behind his head, and his arms make a similar climb along her back. Each of them scrambles to find a way to hold the other closer—more substantially—as if proximity is food and air and everything else that would ever make them open their mouths.

It's silly how their tongues meet. Neither Rex nor Circe really initiates it, or expects it. They collide like two strangers trying to walk through the same door from opposite sides, then shrink away. Before either party can overthink it, Rex goes in for another hit. It's how he functions. With so much of his life missing from his memory, he's learned to dive right into things when opportunity knocks, to seize the moment before it can disappear. It's how he makes up for lost time. He holds onto things, mostly the good when he can. He held onto her even when she seemed out of reach, because one day together had been enough to let him know he didn't want her to disappear. The sight of her being captured surfaces sometimes when his arms are around her, even now while his eyes are closed and his voice is mixing with hers in wordless murmurs, but he holds onto that memory all the same. After all, he never wants to and never will forget their first kiss.

This isn't the first time, but as Circe's fingers rustle through his slick hair, they seek out a lump from when she knocked him out with a piece of modern art on the second floor of a banquet hall; it's been over a year now but she remembers exactly where it hit. She has yet to figure out how to apologize for everything, mostly because she figures it's too late. He forgave her before she had a chance to say sorry, before she felt like she could even afford to be sorry. It frustrates her to have something like that handed to her—she's used to having to earn her place, used to fighting. It's the mentality that kept her alive when she had no one, the mentality that got her into the Pack; the logic that kept her from losing her mind. Around Rex she hardly feels sane, but all that self-preservation and survival finally _mean_ something, just as they do around her family. She knows she's alive. And she pours all of this into her kiss. There are things she's told him time and time again that have never left her mouth in the form of words—not yet.

Their minds drift off for a spell while their bodies do all the work, but once Circe's legs start quivering and Rex starts seeing spots behind his eyelids, they let themselves snap out of it. They disconnect from each other slowly, their limbs feeling heavy as if from sleep, but their pulses breaking off from a marathon pace. With eyes once again open, they realize that their positions shifted at some point. Circe's eyes shoot off to the street, and she clears her throat. Rex had definitely not been up against the wall the last time she looked.

"Whew, _me vuelves loco_," he half-whispers as he straightens out his goggles, which had been knocked out of their usual alignment by Circe's roaming hands, and gives his jacket a firm downward tug.

"What did you just call me?" Whatever Rex has been trying to get away with, she's not entirely sure, but his tone clues her in that she shouldn't be letting him.

Rex's eyes widen, and he brings his hands up on-level with his shoulders, palms facing out. "Wh—No, I—I said 'you drive _me_ crazy'!"

Circe crosses her arms, which have quickly recovered from feeling limp and sedate like the ocean to feeling sturdy and tense like matchsticks. "And what is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"I—just—you—with you, I—I mean—you know what? Forget about it." Rex gestures as if he is literally trying to pick up the pieces of a sentence and arrange them properly, only to end up waving the whole thing off.

"And _earlier_, while we're on the subject?" Circe asks—more or less _demands_—as she leans from one hip into another.

"Oh, _that_... heh-heh... I said you had a beautiful smile—h-_have _a beautiful, um... smile." Though it's honestly more of a frown now, and no less intimidating as when it had the power behind it to knock him back three city blocks, he stands by his claim.

Circe's arms drop gracelessly to her sides. "_O-Oh_, uhh... that's weird, um..."

"Hey, it's not _weird_, it's..." Yeah!" While his brother may still laugh at his Spanish sometimes, Rex in this moment feels like a qualified expert in Stupid-Awkward-Teenager...-ish. At least, he knows he sure can speak it.

"Maybe not for you, _Casanova_, but—!" With that, it hits her. "Have you been looking these up or something?"

Rex's eyes grow even wider. "Uhhh, _no_!"

"You have! You memorized a bunch of sappy romantic phrases just to say to... to say..."

Rex's hands go up in the air, and his eyes roll in the same direction. "Aah, it's not like I memorized _the whole book_, just the ones that were relevant!"

"The ones that... were..."

Rex looks back down at Circe, and his arms droop. "Circe?"

"...We should go, while I still have feeling in my legs."

"Back out in _that_?" Rex asks, directing a thumb out to the street. The whole point had been to get out the rain, or at least that had been the second point. The first had been finding a place to make out. The conversation leading up to such a point had gotten out of hand—boasts were made, bluffs were called, and the fact that air and car horns and everything else was surging past their ears and they had to shout hadn't helped—but neither of them had felt the need to reign it in. They never noticed how the wind was getting stronger, kicking harder; but once the sky broke open like a dam, Rex had an excuse to park ("These goggles don't have windshield wipers!"). And that had been it.

Circe smiles, and it's a weightless smile, no hesitation or justification preceding it in her mind. "You know it."

From there they retrieve the helmets they had haphazardly tossed to the ground. Rex is quick to complain that his had taken on the scent of the gutter and Circe offers the advice, "Then don't bury your face in it. Helmets don't go near your nose," as she straps on her own. Rex sticks out his tongue in an attempt to pout, but can't help but smirk; and Circe, with the personal knowledge of where that tongue has been in the last ten minutes or so, can't help but blush.

The storm has not ceased fire. However, the patches of sky that peak out between buildings and flashing billboards have lightened, clouds dissipating and ammunition almost spent. Rain comes down now in sparse bullets, rocking the lanterns that dangle from wires above as if they were noiseless windchimes. Circe's multi-toned locks beat against the back of her neck in a similar rhythm, her hair still saturated with rainwater but drying somewhat in the breeze. With her arms bent around Rex's neck and chest set against his back, her body takes on more rain from above, while his takes on more rain from the front. Nevertheless, they both only get more and more soaked, but their spirits are still high and dry.

"Oh!" Rex's neck flexes as he remembers something he meant to say before they got back on the road. "Just a heads-up, the guys will probably notice something's up with your, uh..." He shouts loud enough for her to catch every word—her, and a few passers-by on the street whose heads turn the couple's way.

"Lipstick, got it. _Thanks, Rex_," she calls back as she rests her chin in the collar of his jacket and does her best not to pay strangers' eyes any mind. Aware that Rex includes Cricket in the term "guys," Circe expects an onslaught of eyebrow raising and elbow jabs in the ribs once they get back, but at least Cricket's elbow jabs no longer have the potential to puncture a lung.

"No problem!" Rex replies, missing her sarcasm completely.

They don't get very far into the city before Rex is craning his head back to talk to her again. "Oh, and in case you were wondering—"

Circe's eyebrows form a tightly drawn V above her widening eyes. "Rex!"

"What? I hadn't even—"

"Pedestrian!" His eyes go to where she points and it is only then that Rex sees the umbrella, the nice suit, and the look of a stranger fearing for his life.

"Wh-hooa—ow!" Before the reflex can kick in to turn, Rex feels Circe's fingers clamp around his left arm and her yank it to the left fiercely enough to pluck his shoulder right out of its socket. A puddle near the curb erupts into a small geyser as Rex swerves, and while his build misses the man, the water doesn't. "Sorry, dude!" Rex offers as consolation over the stream of angry Chinese that follows and runs too fast for him to understand any of it.

Aside from Rex cutting back on his speed a bit, the ride resumes as usual once their would-be victim is out of sight and earshot. "Again with the pulling, Circ?" Rex groans as he shrugs his left shoulder, working out the kinks.

"It's not like you come with handlebars." She locks her arms around his torso, pushing some wind out of the sail of his jacket. There is a signifcant lack of seatbelts on the Rex Ride as well—not that he would need one when what they are riding on is essentially the lower half of his body, a technicality she'd rather ignore.

"Oh yeah, well, it's not like _you_, uhh..." He turns the beginning of that comeback over and over in his head until it finally just grinds to a halt, then switches gears. If he could figure out the right words he'd let her know how hard it was to pay attention to what's in front of him with her behind him. "Anyway, _I've_ still got more lines. And didn't you say something about them being romantic, hmm?" He peers back behind his shoulder just enough to make eye contact.

Circe promptly screws his head back into the right positon, her legs clenching around her seat as her arms leave his sides. "Eyes on the road, you." She slings her left arm back around him. "And I also said 'sappy,' remember?" she adds while knocking on his helmet to make sure someone's still home in there. Her right arm then rejoins her left.

"Hmm, maybe I'll save them for a better time then?"

"Yeah, and maybe I won't _gag_!"

Rex marvels for a moment at her ability to roll her eyes with her voice, but actually does have a response. "You'll have to guess what I'm saying first!"

"Great..." Circe drones before laying her cheek at the base of Rex's neck in temporary defeat. "...For the record, you _vuelves _me_ loco_." It comes out as a grumble, as it's supposed to, but the sentiment behind it escapes her comprehension up until moments after it's already escaped her lips. She can feel her cheek start to burn against the fabric of Rex's jacket, and she quite honestly wants to slap herself in the face. She ended up saying something embarrassing and awful after all.

"Ehhhhh... close enough!"

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**(Another Author's Note: Let's just pretend Cricket would like to still go by "Cricket" post-Cure Event because I have no idea what her actual name would be other than it is probably Cantonese. XD)**


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